Browsed byMonth: October 2017

I deliberately waited to do my Monday Classics post this week on a Tuesday because I could not resist the idea of actually posting on Halloween. In creating today’s drink, I gave myself a kind of a challenge. There were some beautiful blood oranges at MOM’s Organic Market the other day, and I knew immediately that I wanted them in my Halloween cocktail. Since they’re a citrus, there really were what felt like a million different directions I could go in, but none were scary enough. There was …

Last night I had the great privilege of listening to Glennon Doyle Melton, author of the book Love Warrior, speak at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, the last stop on the Together Live tour. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Together Live brings a diverse group of female speakers before an equally diverse audience to share their empowerment stories. Glennon closed the event last night by reading a love letter she’d written to the audience. In it she mentioned that her favorite …

When I learned about the planets in 3rd grade, it was Neptune that I fell in love with first. I was captivated by its beautiful shade of blue and by the fact that it was named after the Roman god of the sea. He was always my favorite. Neptune is an ice giant, along with its sister planet, Uranus, and it occupies the 8th position from the sun. In terms of size, if we go back to our analogy of the sun being as large as a front door, and Earth being a nickel, then Neptune would be as big as a baseball. A day …

Back at the end of July, I posted about a drink called Parallel Tracks, a riff on a Negroni that blended Cooper River Distillers Rye Oak Reserve rum, Amaro Nonino, and Dolin Rouge vermouth together to create a cocktail that I described as bright, bracing, and smooth. I chose those three particular components because they were so similar in terms of weight, and I knew that they wouldn’t clash or overpower one another. A short time after that, we began to toy with the idea at the distillery of barrel …

I spend a lot of time thinking about inflammation. My mom had an autoimmune disorder called Schleroderma that eventually led to her death, so the topic is important to me on multiple levels. In this modern world that we live in, exposure to inflammation is a constant occurrence. It comes from pesticides in our foods, GMOs, environmental pollutants, chemicals in cleaning products, and so many other things that are part of our everyday lives. Our bodies can ward off a certain amount of …